America Sets Its Taiwan Trap for China

Prepping for a conflict with China has become an all of government effort and China Watch has a good idea of how and when it’s going to play out. And it involves the vigorous island democracy and Pentagon asset known as Taiwan! Circle your calendar for 2020 and stock up on canned goods and lead suits!

You’ll get the skinny on Taiwan’s keystone role in the “Free and Open Indo Pacific” and the upcoming cold/warm/possibly hothothot war with China in this week’s episode of China Watch.

We’re asking the other important questions: if Randy Schriver, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, loves Taiwan so much, why can’t he get the name of his decoration from the government of Taiwan right?

And what legendary anti-Communist figure is Ambassador Harry Harris apparently channeling with his mysterious moustache?

Perhaps no foreign affairs issue in recent history has been so thoroughly misunderstood as the backstory of U.S. engagement with North Korea. That’s because U.S. machinations relating to North Korea are about as dirty, unsuccessful, and embarrassing as can be imagined.

Here’s your chance to understand the context of U.S.—North Korea relations: a trio of special reports I have prepared on the untold story of U.S. duplicity and failure on North Korea. Unknown, that is, to Western observers who rely on the selective historical memories of American policy makers and pundits; but deeply known and felt reality to North Korean and Chinese policymakers for whom U.S. bad faith and betrayal is the default setting in Korean affairs.

John Bolton’s presence on the White House staff is a red flag to Chinese and North Korean policymakers. That’s because John Bolton’s core competency is sabotaging the stated and perhaps genuine intentions of the President of the United States to pursue peace on the Korean Peninsula, and substitute “active measures” to promote regime change.

One of the most consequential failures in modern U.S. diplomacy (or anti-diplomacy) if you prefer, was a disastrous foray into financial secondary sanctions targeting North Korea during the George W. Bush years when John Bolton ruled the North Korea regime-change roost. The sanctions gambit—targeting a tiny, China affiliated bank in Macau—backfired and literally birthed North Korea’s first atomic bomb.

It’s history that the Chinese and North Koreans know deep in their bones, even as the U.S. government tried to deny and ignore the reality of the fiasco. To understand the deep distrust and reflexive caution of Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping in dealing with the United States, you need to know about the Banco Delta Asia gambit of 2005.

This is a non-paywalled China Watch offering posted on the Newsbud youtube channel per the link. Please circulate it among your friends and encourage them to subscribe to Newsbud and get the full story of America’s North Korea boondoggle.

My Asia Brief audio report on the history Americans don’t know… but drives current events on the Korean peninsula. Resentment at the sacrifice of Korea to U.S. Cold War ambitions and the Japanese alliance runs deep…and Koreans in the North and South are finally able to do something about it.

The Korean War was a desperate and dubious battle in which the US was ready to try anything and everything to overcome its strategic and tactical disadvantages. Biological weapons, nuclear weapons…and Douglas MacArthur’s plans for a strategic breakout via escalation of the Korean conflict to a regional war. Everything was on the table.

Douglas MacArthur made the first US attempt to parlay a Korean crisis into an existential confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. With the US milsec establishment, his ideas are more popular—and dangerous—than ever. My documentary uses first hand testimony and declassified archives to finally reveal the truth behind this long-suppressed event.